Baekdal Plushttps://baekdal.com
Strategic insight and analysis for people in the media industryen-usHow audio is becoming the third great format for publishershttps://baekdal.com/trends/how-audio-is-becoming-the-third-great-format-for-publishers/
Audio is growing at a tremendous rate. It is starting to become the third big format for every publisher to integrate into their mix, and it should no longer be considered a separate format.

In this article, we are going to talk about this trend. We are going to look at the many different aspects of audio, and the potential it brings.

Then in my next article (coming soon), we are going to take a much closer look at Zetland, the Danish newspaper that has turned audio into the very thing that drives their audience. We are going to talk about their model and their system, we are going to talk about the strategy, and also very importantly, their production flow that makes all this possible.

But first, what do I mean by audio becoming the third big format for publishers? Isn't it already a big format?

Well, yes, but it goes much further than that. To explain what is happening, let's slightly sidetrack the discussion for a second and let me ask you a simple question.

What is video?

I want you to tell me how you would define video in the digital age.

You see the problem is that you can't actually answer this. Video today is so many different things. We have movies and TV shows, but there is a big difference between whether they are on a cable TV channel, on Netflix, or on the upcoming 'brand' Disney+. While the format might be the same, the business model isn't.

And we have many other forms of video. We have YouTube videos, which range from on-going series, to news reports, to random videos uploaded by someone without any real plan.

We have Twitch streams, ranging from maybe a half-hour TV-like show, to 4-5 hour live streams with fans.

]]>Tue, 21 May 2019 10:39:32 GMThttps://baekdal.com/trends/how-audio-is-becoming-the-third-great-format-for-publishers/The problem with in-market vs out-of-market for publishershttps://baekdal.com/strategy/the-problem-with-inmarket-vs-outofmarket-for-publishers/
One of the fascinating things about the internet is how it has redefined how we look at our in-market and our out-of-market.

In the old days, we didn't really have these two markets. They existed in principle, but not really in practice. For instance, local newspapers defined their in-market as the audience that was living in the same city, whereas their out-of-market were people from other cities. And while newspapers might offer to deliver to these out-of-market readers a day or two later, this out-of-market was never a big focus. It was the in-market that defined everything. The internet has completely changed this.

Take a simple example like a YouTuber. What is the in-market of a YouTuber, and what is the out-of-market?

Is the in-market all the people who live in the same city (or even country) as the YouTuber? No, of course not. Geographic location has no meaning.

So what is it?

Is the in-market the people who have chosen to subscribe to this YouTubers' channel? Well, you might say that, but that isn't really an accurate description either.

You see, the way YouTube works is that its recommendation system will update itself to show you what it thinks you are interested in. Meaning that if you watch a video from one YouTuber, Youtube will start to show you other videos from the same person. And then if you watch some of those, YouTube will continue to show you videos from that channel whenever something new is posted.

The result is that you can end up following a YouTube channel without ever subscribing to it, and if you ask many YouTubers, this 'recommended' traffic can exceed their subscriber traffic, and can even have a larger share of loyal viewers.

Over the past month, I have not been reading the news at all. Yep, I know how crazy that sounds. As a media analyst, how can I not read the news? Isn't that... you know... my job?

Well, yes it is. But I have a very good reason for it. You see, I wanted to look into the growing trend around news fatigue and news avoidance, and I had already been reading up on the many studies and surveys about it, but I needed something more.

So, back in March, I decided to simply test it by not reading news for a week, which turned into a month. And this was both scary and quite interesting. Because while some assumptions people have aren't true, it also helped me see things I hadn't noticed before.

In this article, we are going to talk about what I learned from this, and why this is something that publishers should really think more about.

News fatigue is everywhere

Over the past several years, we have seen many reports that either directly or indirectly link to the problem of fatigue with the media as a whole.

This fatigue comes in many forms. We see a growing number of people who have turned off all notifications, especially to things like social media and newspapers, because there is no value in having your life interrupted 100 times per day by completely random headlines.

We also see the growing trend around social media avoidance, where people have drastically reduced their focus on social channels. For instance, several of my friends have become social media avoiders, where they just don't use Twitter or Facebook anymore.

And they all report that this was one of the best decisions they have made. Not just in terms of freeing up time, (and in doing so realizing how idiotic it is to interact the way we do on social channels), but even more so, they talk about it in relation to their mental health.

They tell me that, once they stopped using Twitter, they felt happier; they got to see the world in a more accurate way; they were less angry every day ... most importantly, they felt less stressed and had less anxiety. Some people even told me it had a big impact on their depression.

At the same time, we see many studies that talk about the increase in anxiety and stress, especially for the younger generation.

But here is the thing, the problem is not just with being distracted by notifications on mobile phones or social media channels. It's also about newspapers and magazines.

In the past, the way you consumed a print magazine was that you dedicated 20 minutes of your time for it, which was then a form of relaxation, but now look at how magazines are published online.

It's like they are designed to give you ultra-short snacks that you feel anxious about. You don't relax with magazine content anymore, because the way the articles are made and how people see them is based on a very distracted form of activity.

The worst part are the newspapers.

When I was a young man (a long time ago), and I had just left home to move into my own place, one of the first things I did was to subscribe to a morning newspaper.

I did this because this was a great way to get a daily summary of the news. And, while it was expensive, it was also an essential part of my day to get a good understanding of the world around me.

However, this is not how news works anymore. Today, the way we publish news online seems to be designed to cause people stress. Every single news story is written in a way to make you feel the news, rather than understand it.

This is not just about the big stories, it's about everything. If a school bus has an accident somewhere, the articles don't just explain what happened. Instead it is written so that it's like you are there, and so you are now experiencing all the horror yourself. This is followed up by eye-witness reports, interviews with the parents, emotional stories from one of the kids telling you how they were all screaming ... and it just goes on and on.

This is how news today is being reported, and instead of helping you get the news, it's an outrage machine. It's a form of content designed to drive an emotional response, because... as we all know... emotional content drives more traffic.

It's like every single newspaper in the world has suddenly turned into a tabloid.

So, one of the things that I have been told by friends, and also that I have heard about in studies, is that reading news has now become a mental health issue. People have not only been fatigued by how the news is reported, and by the volume of it, but also the nature of news today has a direct harmful impact on people's wellbeing on a daily basis.

Even worse, when it comes to the upcoming elections, especially with the US election, we see a lot of people saying that they just can't deal with another media circus like the last time ... which means that the next election will likely result in more news-avoidance than we see today.

And this is not just a problem for news, it's also extremely bad in relation to politics in general. I talked about this in my last podcast, where I discussed how to cover an election.

I mentioned that one of the reasons why so few young people decided to vote was because the way Brexit was covered in the media was simply not relevant to the way young people see the world.

So, this is a big problem.

And while many in the media industry like to point fingers at social media and mobile phones as the cause of this, as a media analyst, I think we have a much bigger problem with newspapers and magazines.

The reason is that a newspaper is supposed to be the place people can turn to when all the other forms of media have failed. For instance, if something happens in the world, we will see so much noise about it on Twitter, most of which we won't know whether we can trust or not. So, the newspaper is supposed to be the place we can turn to when we want to really get informed.

But we are not doing this. Instead, we are doing livestreams and eye-witness reports, and just publishing everything as fast as possible in as many articles as possible, which then creates the very same problem.

And, you are going to hate me for saying this, but I think the problem with newspapers today is that we have turned ourselves into just another social outrage channel.

The result is news fatigue and news avoidance, and it's a growing problem that I am really worried about. We are losing something really critical for the future of news ... which is why I decided to do this experiment.

The start of an experiment

So... over the past few years, I had periods of time where I was just really annoyed with the news. I can't remember what it was that I was annoyed about, but I often had days where I would get up in the morning and see something in the news ... and it would piss me off because of how badly it was reported. And it had a very negative impact on me.

I felt stressed because of it, which is silly, but more than that, it actually impacted my work, where I wouldn't be able to focus on whatever I was actually supposed to write about that day.

Even worse, sometimes I would tweet about it. If you have followed me on Twitter, you might have noticed my occasional Twitter-threads where I do these epic rants about something stupid in the news.

And not only would this take time for me to write, the worst part was the discussions afterwards, where, throughout the entire day, people would reply to my rant and discuss whatever it was we were talking about.

Don't get me wrong. I love having discussions on Twitter, but when it's based on a rant, it just completely destroys all productivity that day. And that's not useful.

So back in June 2017, I took the first step to manage this. I decided to block Trump and most other topics and people related to US politics, because this was usually the source of many of these discussions.

Since then I have set up more than 100 filters on Twitter, and it's the best decision I have ever made. 88 of these filters are permanent, while another 23 of them are temporary that I turn on and off depending on the situation.

For instance, I have a filter for blocking any mention of Facebook, which I turn on whenever the media industry has another one of their anti-Facebook moments.

You know what I mean, every now and then, media-Twitter becomes insanely obsessed about yet another scandal on Facebook and suddenly 80% of your tweets that day are about just that one thing.

This is not helpful, and so I have this filter that I can turn on for 24 hours, or maybe 7 days, that just filters out all future mentions of Facebook from my feed. This way, all the other content that has been drowned out is resurfaced and I can actually start using Twitter for something useful again.

Mind you, when I tell people this, some get really outraged that I'm filtering out journalists talking about Facebook. But remember, I'm not doing this because I don't want to hear about it. I'm doing it because I have already heard about it.

So I don't use these filters to block out information. I use them to control the flow of it. And I have found it to be absolutely critical to my use of Twitter. In fact, I don't think I would even be on Twitter today if I hadn't started using filters.

Twitter without filters is just so bad.

This was how it all started for me. I learned that I could be better informed and more focused by reducing all this noise and the outrage that we often see online.

And so in March this year, I decided to take this a step further and to look into this growing trend I'm seeing around news fatigue.

My plan was simple. For one week, I would not consume any

short-form media, meaning no newspapers, no magazines, but also things like Twitter and Facebook. Instead I would rely only on long-form media channels, like going back to my RSS feeds, relying more on newsletters, or simply not consuming the day-to-day news at all.

I wanted to experience what my friends who had already done this were telling me, but I also wanted to test the many assumptions people have about this. For instance, how people say that 'if news is important enough, it will come to me'. Is that really true?

Obviously, I'm a media analyst, so I wanted to be able to check what I was missing after the experiment was over. So before I started, I set up a system that would automatically take a screenshot of the front page (full page, not just the screen itself) of all the newspapers I usually read every day. Newspapers including several Danish ones, my local newspapers, and things like the New York Times and the Guardian, which I also frequently read.

I spent a day setting all this up, so that I would have a full record of all the news that I had missed. And my plan was then to go back after the week was over and compare. How much news did I actually miss?

And so, on a Friday morning in March, I started the experiment. My idea of starting this on a Friday was to use the weekend to ease myself off my news reading habits ... which turned out wasn't enough.

So what happened?

The week turned into a month

The first thing that happened was that I couldn't stop reading the news. It turns out that I was fully addicted to just browsing the news, often without even thinking.

For instance, I would have a conversation with someone on the phone, and without even thinking about it, my fingers would open up a new tab in my browser, start to type in nytimes.com, and then I would just start reading the news. And it was about a minute or so into doing this that I realized what was going on.

It was really shocking how often I did this. On the first day alone, according to my browser history, I did this 23 times. And every time I had to stop myself and say: "Hey, wait-a-minute. Why am I reading the news? Stop doing this!"

I'm reminded of a video that Casey Neistat posted on his YouTube channel where he talked about his social media addiction. As he says:

This was what it was like for me as well, except I was doing this with news and newspapers.

You might say that as a media analyst, I had a good excuse for doing this, since following the news is part of my job, but it's scary to realize just how addicted I was to checking the news, and how I was doing it as a form of distraction.

But what was really worrying was how long it took me to change this habit. I had thought I would be able to do this over the weekend, but it took most of the following week before I finally started to not read the news all the time.

So, during the first week, I didn't actually learn anything about news fatigue, I only learnt that I was addicted to news. And so when the week was over and the experiment was planned to end, I decided to extend to a full month. I just didn't feel that I had learned anything from it yet.

So, before I move on to the next 3 weeks, I want to talk about Twitter for just a second.

As I said before, my plan included not using Twitter and Facebook. Facebook was pretty easy because my Facebook feed is just memes, and so not checking that was just wonderful, and I stopped doing that after just a day.

But Twitter was another story. Already on the first Monday, I was discussing something important that had happened in the media industry, and I had no idea what was going on. And so when I checked Twitter because someone asked me to, I noticed how much information about the media industry I just hadn't seen.

And while there are a lot of bad things about Twitter, it is also how we in the media communicate. So, I turned Twitter back on, but I made changes to how I used it. I became much more aware of when I was checking Twitter, and I was very focused on not clicking on news related tweets.

Anyway, back to the news ... or rather, not back to it.

So, after this initial week, I finally got to a point where I wasn't just checking the news without thinking, and I got to experience what true news avoidance is really like. And it was very interesting.

In the second week I started feeling FOMO, or the 'Fear Of Missing Out', and I was thinking that I needed to check the news because, what if there was something that I needed to know?

But what was really interesting was that, by not reading the news that week, my FOMO completely went away. I went from being anxious about not reading the news, to ... well... just not thinking about it. Nor did I feel it had any impact on my work.

Slowly, over the next couple of weeks, my mental state started to change. I started feeling a big difference in my everyday mood. I felt less stressed, less angry, and this specifically made a big difference in the mornings.

Before, I would wake up and read the news as the first thing I did every day, and I would get annoyed about a million different things. But now that I was no longer reading the news, I would just get up and focus on whatever I had planned to do. In other words, I didn't get distracted before the start of each day.

The result was that my FOMO was completely replaced by JOMO, or the Joy Of Missing Out. I started enjoying not reading the news, and started to not want to go back.

And so, after this month of experimenting, I now fully understand why some of my friends have become news avoiders. It is wonderful. And as a media analyst, this scares me.

I have learned so much about this, but more than that, my perception of the issues we face in the media has changed as well.

But the big question is: What did I learn about the news itself? Did I notice something that we need to change? Do I have something to recommend?

Well, yes. So, let's talk about that.

News doesn't just come to you

The first thing that I wanted to know was whether it was true that all the important news would just come to you regardless. This is something we hear a lot of people say, that if there is something critical for you to know, you will learn about it, either from social channels or just via word-of-mouth from friends and family.

And during this month, there were a number of big news stories. There was the Mueller report, there was some big news in relation to Brexit, there were a number of big terror attacks, and of course the Notre-Dame fire. And there were also other big events, like the first photo of a black hole.

Most of these did come to my attention, in fact, I somehow learned about the Notre-Dame fire before the fire fighters had even arrived on the scene.

But what was really interesting was how this information got to me.

The black hole event, for instance, didn't get to me via anyone in the media. Instead, I learned about this from a mathematician that I follow, and then I learned even more from some of the astrophysicists that I also follow. But none of my media friends really focused on it, because they were all so focused on whatever political thing was happening that day.

It was kind of the same with the two big terror attacks that happened. I did hear about them, but I didn't hear about the attacks themselves, instead I heard about it because of how everyone in the media went into one of their anti-Facebook outrage moments.

In other words, I didn't hear about the terror attacks in the form of news. I only heard about it in the form of media outrage towards Facebook.

And this was very typical of the news that got to me over that month. It was the same with the Mueller report. I didn't hear anything about what was in it, but I heard about how journalists were outraged by something about it.

In other words, instead of getting news, I just got outrage. And when people say that 'if the news is important enough, you will hear about it', this is not true. You are not hearing about the news, you hear about the outrage. I only heard about the topics that drove the most outrage.

What you are not hearing about is actual useful news, and you are not getting the news in a newslike way.

What I mean is that there is a very big difference between being outraged and getting the news. Outrage is an emotional response. You are just reacting to something, whereas real news is educational. It's something that you learn from.

And during this month, I wasn't getting the real news at all.

But this is where we come to the difficult part, because after this experiment was over, I took a day out to look over all these screenshots I had now collected, and I spent an entire day just trying to understand what it was that I had missed.

News is different from word-of-mouth, but not better

So, I have some good news for you, and I have some bad news.

Let me start with the good news.

One of the things I noticed when reading up on the past month's news was that all the newspapers have a much more varied and interesting coverage than what you experience on a day-to-day basis.

Take the New York Times as an example. Before I did this experiment, I was generally checking the New York Times every day, and often more than once per day. And the impression I had from this was that the New York Times was very Trump-focused.

But after taking a month out and not reading news at all, and then spending a day looking through all the stories covered (on the front page), I noticed a much more varied, much more interesting, and much more journalistic coverage than what I had felt before.

This is great.

It illustrates something about consumption models. Mind you, I'm speaking about this purely based on my own experience, but there seems to be a problem with the way people consume media on a daily basis, where you get so caught up in the day-to-day drama that you do not see all the other stories that a newspaper covers.

And by taking this month off and then reading the news retrospectively, I came to experience news in a different way. And this was not just true for the New York Times. I noticed the same thing with the Guardian, and the Danish newspapers I had taken screenshots of. All of them had a much more varied news coverage than I had noticed before.

I think this is something we can learn from. If we can get people out of that day-to-day outrage, we have something bigger to work with. There is a potential here that we might be able to do something with.

I find this to be very positive but also very interesting. And that's a good thing.

The bad thing, however, was actually two things. And they were both really bad.

The first bad thing was that, as I was spending this day catching up, I was overwhelmed by how negative the news is, and I could feel all the stress and anxiety coming back to me. Not reading the news for a month, and then suddenly spending an entire day reading up on it all was... quite literally ... unpleasant.

I have no better way to say this, but reading the news was a terrible experience. And more than that, it didn't feel like it was reflective of reality. Instead, it felt as if it was some kind of parallel universe where the journalists were trying to create a type of forced negativity.

And I think this is something that newspapers should do something about. I don't think this is a good way to cover news. I don't think that it reflects the world we actually live in, and also, I don't think this is good for society or the health of our democracy.

To create something good, you need inspiration, and the motivation to move forward, but you are not getting that if the news only focuses on the negatives.

The second bad element is just as bad, and it is about relevance ... or the lack thereof.

So, when I was reading up on all the news, I had opened up a notepad where I planned to write down all the important news stories that I had missed and which were relevant for me to know.

By the end of the day, this notepad was empty.

I did not find a single article that I had missed, that I thought was important and relevant for me to know.

Not one!

Don't get me wrong, I found many news articles that I had missed, in fact, I was astonished by how few things I had actually heard about. As I said earlier, when you don't read the news, you only hear about the big stories that drive outrage, but every other story disappears.

So, almost every story in the news for that month was about something I just hadn't seen or heard about at all. This was a bit surprising to me.

But, even so, when I tried to evaluate whether it was relevant for me to know about all these missed stories, none of them felt like they had enough relevance.

Let me give you an example.

During this month, there was one story in most of the Danish newspapers about a cruise ship that had suffered engine problems in a bad storm, and the passengers had to be evacuated. And this was apparently a big news story.

I had not heard about this at all, and when I read about it a month later, it just didn't feel relevant.

I mean, sure, it was bad for the people who had to be rescued, and there were some who got injured. But there was nothing in this story that had any lasting importance.

This was just another accident like any other. Sure, it was a big cruise ship, but there are thousands that are killed in traffic each month. The news itself didn't have any permanent impact.

It was the same with political news. This was something all the newspapers covered extensively, and I'm sure that on the day it was published it felt really important to talk about.

But when you read those stories a month later, there had already been 5 or 6 other scandals, and they all just seemed so incredibly pointless. Instead of actually addressing the issues, it seemed like everyone was just running around doing nothing.

So, my list of relevant stories that I needed to know about and that I had missed was empty. And we have a phrase that characterizes this. We call this 'throw-away-news'.

But more than that, I think a big reason why I didn't write any articles down was because it was just exhausting to look at all those random news stories. There might have been some very important news in the middle of all this, but the volume was overwhelming.

I hate saying this because, as a media analyst, I would love to tell you that all newspapers are wonderful, and after doing this experiment, I just love the news even more and can't live without it ... but, the reality is the opposite.

As I said earlier, after doing this experiment, I now understand why several of my friends have become news avoiders. And I think we have a really big problem in the industry.

I also see a big opportunity here, because the trends around news avoidance and news fatigue are very real, and they're growing. So there is a new market being formed for publishers who think about news as something else than just the day-to-day outrage.

One part of this is to do slow-news, like what we see from companies like The Correspondent, Tortoise or Zetland. In fact, I plan to write about Zetland soon, because they are doing some really interesting things around audio.

Also, one of the things that Zetland is doing when you sign-up is to ask you how you want the news. Do you want it on a daily or weekly basis?

And after doing this experiment, I have chosen to get it on a weekly basis. I don't need to know the news on a daily basis. It's too shallow. But, if you could give me the stories that are still relevant after a week, then those are something that would very likely be worth reading.

But this is not just about these specific companies, this is about news as a whole. I genuinely think that the news industry has lost its way. We have become so obsessed with the day-to-day scandals that we are missing the real news.

So, I would encourage every newspaper to think about how to create value over time, for each article. Ask yourself if what you are writing about has any real relevance tomorrow, a week from now, or even next month.

If it hasn't, then why are you writing it? Isn't there something better you could give me?

This is one of the important questions that will define the future of news.

For me, this experiment is now over, and I am back to reading the news. Although, I'm not reading it as I did before. This experience has made me far more aware of how I read the news. Instead of just using it as a distraction, my news reading today has become far more focused, and far more controlled, and I have become more selective not just about where I get my news from, but also what type of news I look at.

And I do think that many journalists produce good quality news, and we need that more than ever. While I did see many problems with the news, this whole thing also made me value good news when I see it.

]]>Sun, 05 May 2019 16:55:51 GMThttps://baekdal.com/podcast/episode-011-the-trends-around-news-fatigue-and-avoidance/The future trends that define Disney+https://baekdal.com/strategy/the-future-trends-that-define-disney/
Earlier this month Disney finally presented their plans for their upcoming Disney+ streaming service, and it is a really big thing for the market. Unlike many other streaming services, Disney is redefining the market both in terms of their focus and scale.

From a trend perspective, there is nothing really new, but when a company the size of Disney goes all-in, it acts like a booster for the rest of the industry.

I was also impressed with how Disney 'gets it'. Disney+ is not perfect, but they clearly understand the future trends, where the market is heading, the differences in consumption, and the generational divide ... all very important trends that define so much of our market today.

So, in this 28-page article, we are going to take a deep dive into these trends, what defines them, and how they relate to Disney+ and all the other things Disney is doing.

Key market factors

Before we start talking about Disney, there are several fundamental factors, or trends, that have massively changed the market.

First of all, we have all seen how the entry to the market has changed. In the past, TV was entirely defined by the cable TV packages, where you would buy a bundle of channels, often without being able to pick any channel specifically, and then that was it.

In other words, in the old market of media, the bundle was the defining factor for success.

And this was not unique to the TV world, we see this with all other media markets. In the old days, the most popular newspapers were essentially bundles of random stories; the most popular magazines were those with a wide audience (another bundle); and radio was also a bundle of content.

]]>Fri, 26 Apr 2019 11:28:07 GMThttps://baekdal.com/strategy/the-future-trends-that-define-disney/Machine Learning is like black-magic for publishershttps://baekdal.com/analytics/machine-learning-is-like-blackmagic-for-publishers/
I recently published a Plus article about the importance of measuring time as publishers. We looked at the difference between viewing, watch, activity, and dwell times, as well as the problem with data-overload, and how using machine learning could help fix that.

But the problem with machine learning is that we often don't understand it. For example, machine learning is very good at identifying things like churn, but it doesn't explain it. We get this big list of people that the algorithm thinks won't renew their subscription, but it doesn't tell us why.

So, in my last article, I said that we need to improve machine learning to get a result, and to have it explained to us humans.

I quoted a revised version of the Three Laws of Robotics, to include a 4th law by James Bridle, saying this:

This, of course, is not as easy as it sounds. One big problem is that the machine learning algorithms don't actually know what the data means.

So, in this article, we will have a deeper discussion about this. I'm going to show you what the problem is, and talk about ways that could solve it.

Please note: Like in the last article, I will talk about technical things, but I will not include any code. This article is mainly for editors or media executives, designed to help you better understand this from a strategic perspective.

Hey, computer. Draw me the number 8

The amazing thing about machine learning is that you can get it to look at a very large collection of data and identify patterns we humans cannot see for ourselves. But, after it has done so, it has no idea what it just identified.

For instance, today we can use machine learning to identify cancer cells in human bodies at a higher level of accuracy and much earlier than what a human doctor can do, but if you then asked the computer what a cancer cell looks like, it doesn't know how to answer that.

]]>Mon, 15 Apr 2019 11:36:53 GMThttps://baekdal.com/analytics/machine-learning-is-like-blackmagic-for-publishers/The Correspondent won't open a US office, which makes sensehttps://baekdal.com/strategy/the-correspondent-wont-open-a-us-office-which-makes-sense/
If you have been paying attention to media Twitter last week, you will have noticed the discussion and part-outrage when the Correspondent announced that it won't open a separate newsroom in the US after all. But I think we are missing something important from this debate.

We want the Correspondent to change the way news is made, so why should they have a traditional newsroom?

Well, let me give you my view on this as a media analyst. There are some things I like, and some problems I think they will face.

Before we start, let me very quickly summarize what happened for those of you who don't already know.

The story so far:

November/December 2018: Last year, the Correspondent launched a crowdfunding campaign to set up an English-language version of the Correspondent, following their already successful newspaper in the Netherlands (in Dutch).

The campaign was run from New York, and almost everything about it was based on US activities (at least that was what it looked like from the outside). As a result, many thought of this as the 'US-launch of the Correspondent'.

And there were many indicators pointing in this direction. There was a job ad hiring someone to work in New York; when you became a founding member, they offered to have your name written on their wall ... in New York.

So clearly they had plans, or at least ambitions for a US office.

December 2018: The crowdfunding campaign ended on December 14, 2018 ... and they barely made it. Their goal was to raise $2.5 million, and they reached $2.7 million.

And when you look at how it actually happened, you'll immediately notice that there was a big change ⅔ into the campaign, which was the result of them being featured on The Daily Show.

I also asked the CEO of the Correspondent, Ernst Pfauth, about the audience breakdown, and here is what I wrote in the article:

This certainly sounds impressive, and when I asked Ernst Pfauth about this, he told me that 46% of all members are from the US. And this shows that The Correspondent will have to focus on more than just the US market.

Mind you, in the months leading up to the campaign, most of the (US) press saw this as a US launch, with headlines like: "The Correspondent to launch in the US", but when I asked him about this, he said that the focus wasn't really to be a US-focused site, but to instead expand to the English language.

It was always our intention to launch a global platform. We're expanding to the English-language, not only the US. [...] We chose New York as the location for our campaign office because the US is the biggest English market.

First, they announced that they were hiring a membership director, who would be the person responsible for nurturing their members. And this person would be physically located at their Amsterdam HQ.

Secondly, we were told that there would be no US office, and the whole thing would instead be run from Amsterdam.

Thirdly, he talked about where the journalists would actually be based, as he wrote:

[...] those at the heart of The Correspondent's journalism - the correspondents themselves-will be based all over the world, some in the US no doubt, but not by default.

And with this, media Twitter went crazy. Some said they had been lied to; others were simply disappointed; but worst of all, many started arguing that the Correspondent needed a US office like every other newspaper.

Okay, here is my analysis of this.

We are going to talk about four things. First, the failed communication; secondly, the financial side of it; then about the focus of the Correspondent; and finally, the main problems that I see for them in the future.

Obviously we all agree that the Correspondent failed in their communication to their members. While I might argue that the Correspondent is still way more transparent than any other publisher, this change clearly needed a more in-depth explanation.

While Ernst Pfauth explained what they would do going forward, he didn't explain why. And since then both Founding Editor Rob Wijnberg, and their main ambassador Jay Rosen have provided further explanations and apologies.

Personally, I didn't think much about this. Partly because I'm not located in the US, and secondly, because I already knew that this would have a mainly global focus from my discussions with Ernst back in December. So, I never really considered a physical US office as a requirement for funding. But I can see why some would be upset about this.

However, as a media analyst, my focus is mainly on the editorial and the financial side of things.

So let's talk about the finances.

As I explained above, the Correspondent barely managed to get funded, and before appearing on The Daily Show, their growth rate was so slow that they would probably have ended up way short of their goal.

In fact, this was what their funding levels looked like before that, and as you can see, they have a very slow organic growth rate (about 0.8% growth).

So, if you were to ask me to predict what the growth rates will be going forward, I would be extremely cautious about my answer. I hope that the Correspondent will be a massive success in the future, but I expect it to be a very slow process.

But this is not the biggest problem with their finances. A much bigger problem is the audience mix itself.

As I mentioned earlier, Ernst Pfauth told me back in December that only 46% of their new members were from the US, but then last week we also learned that 40% were Dutch, with the remaining percentage coming from other countries.

The problem here are all the people from the Netherlands. These are most likely existing subscribers for the Dutch version of the Correspondent who wanted to help them launch the English version.

These people already have a better place to be (the Dutch version), so next year when the Correspondent will ask people to renew their membership, this Dutch audience is very unlikely to renew. They will just spend their money on the Dutch version instead, which is far more relevant to them.

So, the 'global' version of the Correspondent actually looks like this. This is the revenue that they have to work with moving forward, and the baseline from which to grow.

What this essentially means is that their crowdfunding campaign failed. Their goal was to raise $2.5 million to start a global English language version. They did raise that money (ended at $2.7m), but $1.2 million came from just one country (USA), with $400,000 coming from other countries (and $1.1 million from The Netherlands).

This is a problem.

So think about it. If you only have $1.2 million, would it make sense to create a dedicated US version of the Correspondent, like many thought they would do? And then also set up an office in the most expensive city in the US?

In theory, they could do this, but it would put so many constraints on their future growth that it would be a nightmare.

So, I agree with the Correspondent that not setting up a separate office and newsroom in the US would be the smarter choice. This gives them far more money to work with, which they can spend on journalism and audience development instead.

It's not the best outcome, but it's the smarter choice.

However, there are other worries as well. Specifically, I'm worried about their 'global' focus.

A local community in a global space?

First of all, I love that the Correspondent is expanding to the English language, because we need more publishers like them. However, global is a big place.

I don't know this for sure, but I suspect that one of the big reasons why the Correspondent has become successful in the Netherlands is because of how close it is to its community.

This is often a problem we see with other newspapers. When they do a study asking people if the news they bring is relevant for "people like me", the results from other newspapers are often abysmal.

What I like about the Correspondent is that they seem to have changed this. I don't have any specific study or metric, but the sense that I get from people talking about them is that their articles are just far more in tune with what their readers are interested in learning about.

So, when I look at what the Correspondent is doing in the Netherlands, I see stories like these:

(All translated automatically from Dutch with Google Translate)

This is great journalism. It's focused, it's in-depth, it has a very 'young' feel to it in terms of what they are talking about, it has a future mindset, and there is no drama or outrage.

But it's also very Dutch, and for someone like me living in another country, most of these articles wouldn't be relevant to read ... well, except the last one by Sanne Blauw, which sounds very interesting to me. (In fact, I just noticed she has done a Tedx talk about it).

This is a problem, because how are the Correspondent going to create an English-language global version with the same community feel? Every single time they write about something specific, it wouldn't be relevant to most people.

For instance, people in the US would be very interested in learning about the problems with US universities, but they wouldn't really care about the Dutch Universities.

Climate change, of course, is a very global topic, but the progress and discussion around this vary greatly between countries. So how can you write one article that would be globally relevant?

I'm not saying that it can't be done, but it's much harder to do.

Then again, we have the financial problems, specifically around growth and churn.

We come back to this chart.

Think about who a global version of the Correspondent would appeal to. Well, as I explained earlier, the Dutch audience will just read the Dutch version instead, because it's already way better and far more personally relevant to them.

But we also have a problem with people in the US. Historically, it has been nearly impossible for any newspaper to get people in the US to read about global news ... except when it relates to the US itself.

I don't mean to disrespect, but the US is extremely self-centered. We can see this every time something newsworthy happens outside the US. I'm not talking about plane crashes or other 'outrage' news. I'm talking about news at the level of the Correspondent. Most of the time, this type of news is never covered, and definitely not featured on the front pages, and even when it is, the traffic is extremely low.

Compare this to Europe where we are used to reading about international news because many European countries are so small. The US market just isn't very globally focused.

So, when you look at the graph above, the Dutch audience will turn to the Dutch version, and the US audience won't really care unless the article is about the US ... which leaves us with only the 14% who are their true global audience.

So, the Correspondent has a huge challenge before them. Not just financially, but also with their scope and editorial focus. This is nowhere near a 'sure thing'.

However...

While I'm not sure that the English version of the Correspondent will ever work, I do think that we need to give them a chance, including not trying to make them do 'what other publishers do'.

When I look at the Correspondent, I see something that I really like. I see much better and far more valuable journalism. I see an editorial style that has a much sharper understanding of relevancy. I see a newspaper that isn't publishing 20 articles about an airplane crash or 100s of stories about what Trump did in the past 24 hours. And I see an understanding for people's time, for their role as part of a community, and the need to think ahead.

I'm not saying that they are perfect, but they are doing many things that I like.

And when I see media people tweet that the Correspondent cannot possibly cover news without an office in New York, what I see is the old world of media. I see the traditional news setup with traditional newsrooms and organizational structures.

I don't think this would be a good solution, I mean, what's next? Should they also have a 'White House correspondent' in order to cover politics? Should they have local journalists in each city before they can cover local issues?

No, because that's the old way of thinking about journalism, and as we all know, the old way doesn't really work that well.

We need some fresh thinking, both in terms of how to define what is news, how to report the news, how to organize a newspaper, and how we define society and communities as a whole.

I have my doubts about the Correspondent. I worry about the financial baseline, their audience mix, and whether they can take what is essentially a very local-feeling version of a Dutch news site and turn that into something that is global. But I want them to try. And I want them to try to do something that other newspapers think is impossible.

]]>Wed, 03 Apr 2019 17:38:32 GMThttps://baekdal.com/strategy/the-correspondent-wont-open-a-us-office-which-makes-sense/Dwell time, watch time, and the new world of audience analyticshttps://baekdal.com/analytics/dwell-time-watch-time-and-the-new-world-of-audience-analytics/
The most important analytics trend that we see with publishers today is the value of time. Publishers have realized that if we want to get people to pay us, the single most important factor is to get people to spend a real amount of time with us. As a result, instead of measuring our analytics in terms of activity, we now see more publishers measure time.

So, in this 27-page article, we are going to take a much closer look at this. How should you, as a publisher, think about this? What should you really measure? What are the patterns? And what kind of things do we see in the market today?

Please note: In this article, I will cover a lot of technical aspects of measuring time, but I will not include any coding examples. Instead, the focus here is on explaining the complexities and the strategies.

Many ways to define time

The first big challenge we come across is that there are so many ways we can measure and define time, and they are all useful for different things.

There is also the problem that different people define time-metrics using different words, even if they are actually talking about the same thing. It's all very confusing. And if you read articles about this online, or worse, go to media conferences, you will come home with all these conflicting definitions of time.

I'm going to clarify all that, and give you a model to help you think about this. And then the next time you hear someone talk about time, you can compare it to this model to better understand what they are talking about.

So let's define time.

There are many different ways that we can focus on this. We can simply measure time as the duration of time passing, but we can also measure it in relation to activity.

]]>Tue, 02 Apr 2019 23:07:31 GMThttps://baekdal.com/analytics/dwell-time-watch-time-and-the-new-world-of-audience-analytics/The Filter Bubble is Actually a Decision Bubblehttps://baekdal.com/trends/the-filter-bubble-is-actually-a-decision-bubble/
I was recently contacted by a new media startup who told me that they had come up with this brilliant idea for how to 'fix the problem with the filter bubble', and asked if they could show it to me.

As a media analyst, I obviously said yes, and...well...then they showed me the same old concept that I had seen so many times before, of trying to fix the filter bubble by just showing people alternative viewpoints from several sources.

This is a concept that many people in the industry think would work, but it completely misunderstands what the problem really is, and instead of fixing the problem, we are actually making it worse. But not only that, we end up creating media sites that have no usefulness or relevance for anyone to read.

So, let's have a discussion about why we need to approach the filter bubble in an entirely different way.

There is no filter bubble, but we have a big problem with the decision bubble

First of all, let's just start by debunking the whole filter bubble itself.

There have been many studies around how people consume media, and they have all found that the problem isn't what people think it is.

First of all, the digital world has enabled people to be exposed to far more news, from far more sources than ever before. This is something we have seen throughout the past 20 years. For instance, we saw this all the way back in 2010, when PEW studied news consumption (as they do every day).

But here is the thing. PEW studies when people consume news, but only certain things are characterized as 'news' as far as PEW is concerned. On top of this, there is also a massive level of exposure to news from many other sources, which PEW do not consider.

For instance, if you ask "did you read the news yesterday?", people think you are asking them if they visited a newspaper site. But in reality, we get news from everywhere, every day. We get news from YouTube. We get news from friends to a much greater degree than before via social channels, and so forth.

So, we know that the volume of news that people now get is much higher than ever before, but also that they are getting it from a much larger number of sources.

You might argue that this is 'part of the problem', that the reason people become misinformed is because they are now also getting their information from other sources who might not be very accurate. And I agree that is a problem. But it's not a filter bubble.

Being in a filter bubble means that you are somehow only exposed to one set of information, but that's not what is happening here. If you actually measure how much information people are exposed to, you will immediately see that the public are exposed to more viewpoints than ever before. This is the opposite of a filter bubble.

Another thing we know is that there is a very sharp generational divide. We know, for instance, that it's mostly the older generations who end up sharing fake news. In fact, those above 65 share more than 7 times as much fake news as those aged 18-29. We also know that news sites like Fox News generally have a very old demographic.

This is weird, because in the media industry we keep attributing the filter bubble to young people, like blaming YouTube for creating a filter bubble for recommending similar videos.

But when we look at young people, we don't see the same problem as we do with the older generation. Yes, young people watch much more content from YouTube, but they are also sharing much less fake news. On top of that, we see that young people have a much wider news consumption; they check more newspapers; they often spend more time verifying stories by checking what others read, or say about it; they often turn to search, and they are generally far more skeptical about any single source.

This has been proven in studies again and again.

So, we don't have a filter bubble, at least not for the younger generation. It's a myth that is very easily debunked.

What we do have, however, is a decision bubble.

The decision bubble

Something we see all the time is that there are many people who end up believing something that simply isn't true, and it is quite painful to watch.

Let me give you a simple example. Take the flat-Earthers. I mean... they are clearly bonkers in their belief that the world is flat, and when you look at this you might think that this is because they are living in a filter bubble.

But it isn't.

You see, the problem with the flat-Earthers isn't that they have never heard that the Earth is round. They are fully aware that this is what the rest of us believe in. They have seen all our articles and they have been presented with all the proof.

In fact, when you look at how flat-Earthers interact online, you will notice that they are often commenting or attacking scientists any time they post a video or an article about space.

So flat-Earthers do not live in a filter bubble. They are very aware that the rest of us know the Earth is actually round, because they spend every single day attacking us for it.

It's the same with all the other examples where we think people are living in a filter bubble. Take the anti-vaccination lunatics. They too are fully aware that society as a whole, not to mention medical professionals, all recommend that you get vaccinated. And, they also know that the rest of us think about them as idiots.

They are not living in a filter bubble, but something has happened that has caused them to choose not to believe what is general knowledge.

Another example of this is climate change. Every single politician fully knows that the majority of scientists have identified that climate change exists and why it is happening. But they still choose not to believe in it.

In fact, there is a wonderful video about this made by VOX that illustrates how US politicians went from believing in climate change, to suddenly becoming more focused on pleasing their donors and achieving short-term voting support.

I mean, just look at this video and you instantly see that the problem isn't that the politicians are living in a filter bubble. They are fully aware what conclusions the scientists have made, they even used to believe in them. But something has changed in recent years that made them 'decide' otherwise.

So think about what we are doing in the media industry.

We look at these problems and then we say: "OMG, people are living in a filter bubble" ... and then we think we can solve this by writing articles about, for instance, how the Earth is really round.

As journalists, we think this is excellent reporting, because we are providing people with the facts and we are acting against the bad people in society. But in reality, articles like this have no effect on the flat-Earthers.

The flat-Earthers already know all of this, they have even prepared conspiracy theories that explain why they think all of this isn't true. And they have hugely complex counter-explanations on hand.

So, all you are doing here is to give them another thing to attack. This solves nothing.

It's the same thing I see with media startups who try to 'fix the problem of the filter bubble' by exposing people to alternative viewpoints.

For instance, the model I see most startups focus on is to identify other articles about the same topic but from opposing publications or with opposing viewpoints.

For instance, if you're reading an article from CNN, these startups plan to then show you an article from Fox News or Breitbart as well, so that you can get an 'alternative viewpoint'. And the same thing the other way around... so if you read an article from Fox News, they will show you the opposing viewpoint in an article from CNN.

But think about how terrible this really is.

First of all, it's not going to change the minds of anyone. For instance, if you are an anti-vaxxer, getting the opposing viewpoint is not going to change your mind, because you already know that other people are telling you to vaccinate your kids.

But worse than that, by constantly exposing people to alternative viewpoints, you are teaching the public not to trust anything. Because every single time they read about a fact from one news source, this startup will present you with an 'alternative fact' (for the sake of balance) from another news source. So, as a normal person, how the heck will you ever be able to tell what is true and what is not?

As a media startup, you are telling people that information and facts are a matter of viewpoints, and that there are always alternative facts to be had.

It's the worst thing you can possibly do.

If you want people to become informed, never ever tell them that facts are a matter of opinion, and that you can just look at different opinions and then decide what you believe in the most.

I mean... seriously. Why would any media startup think this is a solution to anything? It's insane!

So... how do we really fix this?

The fix...heh...hmmm

To really fix this problem, we need to think about this in a different way. First of all, remember what I said in the beginning of this article. The problem we are faced with today is not a filter bubble, it's a decision bubble.

So already here, we can see how differently we really need to approach this. You can't fix this by trying to show people more information from more sources. Instead, we need to approach this in terms of why these decisions happen in the first place.

So, we need to approach this in two ways. There is one approach for people who are already convinced by something that isn't true, and then there is another approach for normal people who haven't been 'converted' yet.

So let's talk about the people who have already decided to believe something that isn't true.

What we need to realize is that we cannot fix this by telling them that they are wrong. They already know this and they have just chosen not to believe it. No amount of 'fact-checking' is ever going to change that.

What we need to do instead is to figure out why they made the decision to think this way in the first place.

I don't really have a possible answer for the flat-Earthers, because those guys are just weird, but think about the anti-vaxxers.

What makes a parent decide not to vaccinate their kids? One reason might be an economic one. In the US (in particular), healthcare comes at a very high cost, and while there are ways to vaccinate kids cheaper (or even for free), people in the US are very afraid of engaging too much with the healthcare system.

So as journalists, we need to focus on that instead, because it's highly likely that many people who make this decision do so because they worry about their financial future. In other words, not wanting to vaccinate their kids might be an excuse that they cling to because of financial concerns.

It's the same with climate change. Most people can see with their own eyes that our climate is changing, and they can see how this is affecting different places. But the problem is that it's 'other people's money'.

So, one thing we keep hearing from US politicians is that people shouldn't believe in climate change because that would raise taxes or cause people to lose their jobs in old industries.

In other words, the politicians are using the lie to win votes, by convincing people that they will be better off not believing in climate change.

As journalists, we cannot change that by arguing that they are wrong. That will get us nowhere. Instead, we need to change the narrative to make it more convenient to believe in climate change.

For instance, we need to tell people how they can save money by doing things that are better for the environment. We need to show them all the new jobs that are coming because of the new ways we are doing things. We need to help them get those jobs. We need to illustrate how you can feel better by eating 20% less meat, and give people easier ways to do that. We need to promote companies who are creating new and more efficient ways to achieve something in a more environmentally friendly way.

In short, we make believing in climate change the better option. We change the narrative so that future politicians realize that they can win more votes by supporting the future environment, rather than lying about it.

Mind you, I'm mentioning two problems here, but as publishers, the focus isn't to specifically support those two causes. Fundamentally, I don't believe it's the journalist's job to promote any specific cause.

However, it is our job to promote real facts. And the problem we are faced with today is that people choose to believe in the lie because they think it's more convenient to them. So the only way to promote the facts is to make believing in them more convenient instead.

This is the change I would like to see from journalists and media startups. Don't focus on telling people that what they have chosen to believe isn't true. Figure out why they think like that, and figure out how to make it more convenient to think about the truths instead.

This leads us to a second problem, which is the problem with normal people who end up being misled.

What does a normal person do?

Well, a normal person believes that the Earth is round, because that seems obvious. A normal person vaccinates their kids, because that's what the doctors recommend. Normal people believe in climate change, because... well... we can see it with our own eyes.

So, by default, normal people are fine. But then in the media, we often report about things in such a way that we create doubts.

There are many terrible examples of this. One example is ITV's This Morning, which is one of the top morning TV shows in the UK.

It is often doing things like this:

This is just terrible in every single way. Not only are they providing exposure and attention to some random person with an opinion completely devoid of facts, they are also presenting it in such a way that it is given equal exposure to a real scientist, making it appear as if both 'sides' have equal weight.

But that's not the worst part. The worst part was when they asked people "what do you think?"

Think about what this does. First they introduce 'alternative facts' in such a way that it creates doubt in people's minds. Then they encourage people to make up their own minds by simply choosing which fact they believe in the most.

In other words, they have turned fact into opinion.

This is the single worst thing that we can do, because while most normal people aren't going to believe the moon isn't solid after watching this, there is a much smaller group of people who are 'on the edge' who might actually end up believing this.

But this is not just with ITV, we see this everywhere. We see it in the newspapers when they invite pundits to write editorials, or when we interview them ... or even just when we report about something they did.

Or take the recent show on Netflix called 'Behind the Curve', which made flat-Earthers look very silly.

Again, people like you and me won't be changed because of this, nor will any of the existing flat-Earthers. But those who might change are those on the edge. In other words, we end up polarizing the public, causing the flat-Earthers to grow.

So, as I wrote in my last article about election coverage, we need to rethink how to deal with attention. People like this should never have been covered in the first place.

Think about this in relation to media startups. When they say that they want to 'fix the filter bubble', by exposing people to alternative viewpoints from multiple sources, they are creating the exact problem that they are trying to avoid.

First of all, they are reducing the concept of facts into a matter of opinion ... which is really bad.

Second, they expose normal people, who have no reason to doubt the facts they already have, to alternative and inaccurate viewpoints ... which is also really bad.

Third, it completely and totally erodes all trust in the media, because how can you trust the media if every story is mixed with another story with conflicting reporting?

And finally, for the people who are already 'out there', they are going to see these conflicting sources of information as proof that their weird conspiracy theories are right, because they can just say that 'nobody really knows yet'.

Again... it's all really, really bad.

Do not ever do this.

What we need to do instead is the complete opposite of this.

First of all, realize that we do not have a filter bubble, we have a decision bubble.

Second, realize that the reason why people end up making these bad decisions is often because of two things. Either it is because of outside factors, where making the bad choice is the more convenient option. Or, it's because we added doubt in such a way that people couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't.

Third, realize that exposure and attention by itself often causes more problems than it solves. For example, by focusing on flat-Earthers, you create more flat-Earthers, even when you report about them in a negative way.

So, create a media startup with none of these things.

Doubt is the result of being exposed to too many stories with conflicting information, so to prevent that, we need to step up as publishers and only report about a story when we actually know what is true and what isn't. Don't just report the news and then let people make up their own minds on who they want to believe, figure that out first.

We also have to focus on trust and reliability. To do that we have to massively raise the bar, and we have to show our work. Show people why our information is trustworthy and reliable, by illustrating to them how this information was gathered and analyzed.

Make the factual world the best choice. Focus your editorial strategy around a form of journalism where the value of reporting matches the value of the facts. Make it better for people to work towards that.

They asked which professions / organizations people thought would have the most positive impact on solving future problems. At the top we had science and technology, and at the bottom... well... see for yourself.

I mean... just look at this. This is how bad things are right now.

So if you want to create a new media startup, focus on this instead. Make your media the place people turn to to get clarity, to have a place not only to get information, but also a place that makes it very easy to understand how that information came to be and why it is trustworthy. But most of all ... create a place that people think will have a positive impact on their own future problems.

The next US election is coming up. Well, it's about 20 months away, but as you have probably noticed, the 'election cycle' has already started. And, as we all know, the way we cover elections is not the best it could be.

So, in this article (which you can also listen to as a podcast), I will do something special. I'm going to talk about some of the higher-end strategies and concerns that we should consider as publishers. More specifically, I'm going to imagine that I am a wealthy philanthropist (which I'm not) and I have just decided to publish a new newspaper with the aim of covering the election. And the question is then, how would I, as a media analyst, put that together? How different would that be from what we see today?

Sounds fun? Well, let's get to it.

Some quick notes

Before we start, there are a few quick things I want to mention.

First of all, I am a media analyst. What this means is that it's my job to help the media do better. Sometimes by helping you see a better future, but also by using constructive criticism and pointing out when we do something wrong.

What I am not is a political analyst. It's not my job to analyze the politics or try to fix our politicians. Also, I'm not a tech reporter. Many people in the industry have come to believe that the tech channels are causing a lot of the problems. And yes, there are problems on these channels (although to a much lesser degree than what most seem to think). But again, my focus is not to fix the tech channels.

Please keep this in mind as you read this. If you start to think "Oh, but this is the politicians' fault", you might be right, but this article is not about what other people do. It's about what we can do in the media.

Finally, I will be using the US election and Brexit as examples, but obviously everything here also applies to any other election coverage in any other country.

Anyway, enough about the quick notes. Let's get on and rethink how to cover an election.

Organizing a newspaper

One of the fundamental problems with newspapers is how they are defining their focus areas, or rather, how they are not defining them.

Whenever you go to a newspaper, you are usually presented with generalized topics like these: World, U.S., Politics, Business, Opinion, Tech, Science, Sports, Arts, and Video. And when it's election time, they add another section called 'Election'.

This might all sound very normal if you are a traditional newspaper, but think about what this is. When you define your coverage around topics like World, U.S., or Politics, you are not defining any specific focus. Instead, you've just put up a box that you can put your random articles into.

]]>Tue, 19 Mar 2019 11:06:26 GMThttps://baekdal.com/podcast/episode-010-covering-the-elections-from-the-perspective-of-a-media-analyst/Advertising Analytics is from Mars; Subscriber Analytics is from Venushttps://baekdal.com/analytics/advertising-analytics-is-from-mars-subscriber-analytics-is-from-venus/
Over the past many years, we have all seen the tremendous shift in how we, as publishers, are measuring traffic. Many of the larger publishers have now built or implemented analytics systems that are designed specifically for their needs, and we constantly hear about new efforts to identify critical metrics about our audiences.

This is all really exciting, but in this Plus report, I want to look at a specific subset of this, which is the amazing difference between the metrics we use for advertising, and what we use to measure subscribers. Because, as I wrote in the title, advertising analytics is from Mars, whereas subscriber analytics is from Venus ... they are nothing alike.

Let's start by talking about the simplest example of all. What is a view?

A view is 87 minutes long

Anyone who has ever had to deal with advertising knows that the way the industry defines a view is ...well ...crap.

For instance, the official standard from IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) is that an ad view is when 50% of the ad is visible for 1 second (two seconds for a video ad).

I mean... what the heck?

Everyone knows that this has nothing to do with a view. I would even go so far as to call this fraud. If you only see half an ad for one second, you haven't actually seen the ad at all.

It's the same with any other platform that is designed for advertising. On Facebook, for instance, a view is defined after 3 or 10 seconds. But again, think about how insane this is.